The lighter side of ADHD
Even ADHD-oriented media is often being dishonest with people who suspect themselves to have this condition, being toxicly positive and showing ADHD as a "superpower" as if you can hyperfocus your way to success. It is neither a gift nor even an equal exchange between advantages and drawbacks like "you'll be always late but also always creative!" It's a crippling thing that may ruin career or end a relationship. There is nothing good with ADHD.
I'm beginning to suspect "superfocus" is just what normal people do when they focus.
Basically. When in reality it's indistinguishable from laziness to the untrained eye.
Absolutely. People want there to be a fair trade-off, but life just doesn't work that way. I've seen similar romanticization of autism too, especially with the "savants".
Sorry. Most of that shit has been my fault, and people like me.
In recent times, there's been a push to reclassify certain disabilities from .. disabilities, into "neurodivergence." in an attempt to destigmatize certain disorders, and cast them in a new light as part of human evolution.
The idea that life is a min-maxing situation comes from the "just world fallacy", the fallacious belief that all good and evils "must balance out". Someone born with some profound disability might have no overarching heartwarming lesson for society to learn, and life might just be about abject cruelty.
I don't know if the community appreciates or hates that change, but, I've seen autism go from being called something quite hateful (/r) in the 1990s, to becoming a spectrum, to people working with autistic people and just calling them "different".
The romanticization might come from movies like Rain Man, and the few high profile savant cases (on ASD), e.g: I recall speculation that Bill Gates and Elon Musk both had Asperger's Syndrome.
What's your take on this?
I think it's definitely had the positive effects that you mention. People are far less cruel, more understanding, and also WAY more willing to go seek help with these types of problems than they used to be.
The negative effect is that anytime something becomes romanticized, it's human nature for people to adopt it as an identity, which introduces a lot of noise to the conversation, and we lose some of our objectivity toward it, as now there's an emotional attachment to the label itself. For example:
All that being said, I still think it's a net-positive effect. This is just what happens anytime something clinical enters the mainstream conversation.
This meme makes a good point I’ll look into it tomorrow. I’m too busy ignoring the mountain of stuff I need to get done today to have the time
The shiny thing is also accurate.
Except it's not so much "shiny" that distracts me, as it is literally anything.
There are things that I've intended to do for months. Many times, I've been on my way to do it, only to have some little thing distract me, and then completely forget about what I intended to do. Maybe a child asks me a question. Maybe I stop to take a sip of water. Maybe I just start thinking about something else in that 10 second walk. The significance of the distraction does not matter; the task immediately vacates my mind. I often even remember that I was going to do something, but I cannot remember what.